Finish: Give Yourself the Gift of Done pdfdrive com

Hiding Places
Let’s discuss hiding places first. A hiding place is the safe place you go to hide
from your fear of messing up. It’s the task that lets you get your perfectionism
fix by making you feel successful even as you avoid your goal.
Some hiding places are easily spotted as the unproductive traps they are. If
you’re watching Netflix every time it’s time for you to do X, that’s a hiding
place. You’re afraid to face the fear of imperfection that comes along with every
endeavor, so you’re hiding from it by doing something that requires no skill.
You might write a bad sentence on your blog, but no one’s going to critique the

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way you watch TV. “I just feel like he could be doing a better job of fast-
forwarding through the opening credits of each show.”
Other hiding places can look like productivity, but they’re deceptive. Like
quicksand. Quicksand doesn’t look that different from a regular beach. (If you
Google Image search “quicksand,” in addition to finding photos of women in
bikinis, because God forbid a single Internet search not return that, you find
some very boring looking photos of sand.) Quicksand looks like the tide has
recently gone out on the shore. But it’s actually sand that has liquefied and the
weight you put on it sucks you deeper down into it.
Hiding places are tricky like that. They make you feel like you’re doing well
when in reality you’re not getting anywhere on your most important projects.
My wife, Jenny, calls me out on hiding places all the time. One afternoon
she said, “I know you’re avoiding writing when your in-box is immaculate.”
As I mentioned earlier, I hate e-mail. I hate my in-box. I hate everything
about that form of communication. But when I have other work I need to finish,
it provides the perfect hiding place for me. It’s never done. There’s always one
more folder to empty and one more contact to stay in touch with. I can write a
perfect e-mail and feel great about myself for working hard.
The best/worst part is that when you empty your in-box by responding to
people, it just guarantees that they will respond, which means your in-box is full
again. It’s a never-ending cycle, like the ocean tide. Plus, I can justify it by
saying that I’m making money by responding to opportunities. I can feel like a
good business owner by answering questions for customers. I get all the buzz of
accomplishment with very little of the real work.
I’d write the best book ever if I didn’t have so many e-mails! Oh, cruel
world, and your constantly returning e-mails. I wish I weren’t so busy.
If you’re going to finish, you have to ignore these two hiding places. Here
are a few simple ways to identify them:
1. Do you find yourself going there accidentally?
If you blink and find yourself working on something besides your real
goal, you’ve probably retreated to the first kind of hiding place: the
obvious time waster. You will never accidentally end up doing a difficult
project. The work you’re trying to avoid is not something you’ll stumble
upon one day unexpectedly. “I just looked up and I was sorting through
all the job applications people had sent in. It was a task I’d put off for
weeks, but there it was!” You’ll never accidentally work out. “I meant to

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watch TV, but the next thing I knew, I was doing burpees!” Difficult
work requires discipline. The hiding places perfectionism offers don’t.
You don’t have to tell yourself to bite your nails if you’re a nail-biter. It
just happens. Especially during stress. Is there a project you keep
returning to? One you can’t let go of? I once spent hours trying to craft a
perfect postcard for The Home Depot. Finally, my boss came over and
reminded me that no one was going to remember that postcard. But every
executive we reported to was going to review the new catalog I was
supposed to be writing. It represented a gigantic shift in our business and
was really difficult to finish. I would much rather screw around with the
postcard than deal with the catalog. It was a lot easier to accidentally
stumble back into the postcard project than it was to work on the bigger
project. What’s the app you open up on your phone without even
thinking? We all have one of those. You barely touch your phone and
next thing you know, you’re scrolling through Instagram.
2. Do you have to play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon to justify why you’re
giving it time?
If you ever have to do a complicated, multistep explanation to say
why what you’re doing is valuable, it probably isn’t. You’re probably
actually camping out in the kind of hiding place that masquerades as
productivity. I could have argued that running a fantasy basketball league
was teaching me how to build an audience with consistent content. That
has the perfect appearance of being helpful, until you peel the onion a
little. If you spend days and weeks building an audience that likes the
funny way you write about basketball, what makes you think that same
audience is going to love your comical insights about goal setting?
What’s that transition going to look like? “You know how you love my
thoughts on Michael Jordan’s vertical leap? What about a book I wrote
about my inability to complete projects? See how those are related!” Only
they’re not. I would have to jump at least a few steps away from my real
goal, of writing a book, to justify my basketball newsletter. Is what
you’re working on directly in line with what you want to finish, or is it
disconnected by a few steps that take some creativity to explain?
3. What do your friends think?
If you really want to find a hiding place, ask a friend. It’s easy to

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If you really want to find a hiding place, ask a friend. It’s easy to
deceive yourself by thinking a task is useful, and we can’t identify it as a
hiding place as quickly as a friend can. Ask someone close to you if
you’re spending time, energy, or money on something that’s not
important to your goals—and don’t listen to perfectionism when it tells
you not to do this. Perfectionism loves isolation. It would prefer you go it
alone, convincing you that relying on others is cheating. You should just
be strong enough not to need anybody. That’s ridiculous. Why does it tell
you that? Because it’s easier to beat one person than it is a team. And
most of the worst decisions you’ve ever made were made alone. That’s
why.
The goal of those questions is to get a few hiding places identified.
Once you identify the hiding places, the logical thing is to take the time,
energy, and money you are spending in the hiding place and spend them on the
activities that help you meet your goals.
If you want to write an album, do the things it takes to write an album. I
don’t know what those are, but I know they all require time, energy, and
probably money.
If you identify one of these hiding places, you should stop going there with
your time. The hour you spent watching TV is gone forever. You might, as Bon
Jovi sang, wake up with an ironclad fist and French kiss the morning, but that
hour will never come back. Also, grossest line in a love song. What does that
even mean? If you saw someone on a plane wake up from a nap and French kiss
the morning, you’d call a sky marshal.
Energy is a little more difficult to measure, but is just as expensive as time.
Einstein did his best work when he was employed at the ever-boring patent
office. Why did this help him? Because his mundane job didn’t drain him
creatively. He came home with full reserves. Don’t spend your energy on hiding
places if you can help it.
Finally, stop spending money on your hiding places. If you can’t afford to go
to the gym you really like because you don’t have the money, expensive
vacations might be a hiding place.
You have a limited amount of time, energy, and money. We all do.
If something is stealing from any of those reserves, be careful.
The flip side is that some things aren’t distractions, they’re commitments.

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Your corporate job, for instance, might not be something you love, but it’s
not a hiding place, it’s a commitment. Giving that time and energy is what you
should do. Your kids are not distractions. This one was hard for me because
when they were young my kids dropped their afternoon nap. If you don’t have
kids, that might not sound like a big deal, but if you do, you know exactly how
painful that is. And we didn’t discuss this or get to vote on it either. One day
they just decided, You know what? We’re done with that nap. You know those
ninety minutes you treasured each Saturday afternoon? We’re liberating them.
They belong to us. We’re captains now.
Just like that, they were gone.
This is going to happen to you. Your kid will get up at the same time every
day for a solid year, right up until the morning you decide to get up early to work
on something. On that morning, she will pop out of bed early and ask you an
awful lot of questions about Go-Gurt. But that’s OK. Your kids are
commitments. So is your health. So is your spouse.
But that project that you always work on rather than move toward your
dreams? Those hours spent doing X instead of what really matters? It’s time to
recognize that the peace hiding places give you is a false one. They don’t protect
you—instead, they keep you from reaching your goals. It’s time to recognize
hiding places for the perfectionism trap they are and to step out into the light.
Even more important, it’s time to turn hiding-place activities into tools that
will help you make it to the finish.